I want to put a TW here but I know someone who’s about to get one would read this anyways so I just want you to know that not everyone has a painful experience, for some people it doesn’t hurt at all or it just kinda hurts. I also want to add that I have had this IUD since January 2020 and I have had zero issues, and I do not regret getting it at all, and I would do it again. I needed birth control to help my endometriosis.

I was sick of my gynecologist telling me “I just needed to adjust” to birth controls that were making me vomit everyday and bleed for months straight. I went and found a new gynecologist and he kinda matched me with the IUD based on my past experience with pretty much all other forms of birth control. We set up an app and I took 800 mg ibuprofen and went in 45 minutes later.

They measure your womb first to make sure the IUD will fit which basically means they shove a stick up through your cervix and into your uterus and that was painful because my cervix was completely closed and stiff so I was “manually dilated.” And in the process of that, he cut my cervix about a half inch. The cervix is tiny so think about how bad that is.

None of this pain even compared to the actual IUD insertion itself. I don’t think I have ever felt pain like that before or since and the only way I can describe it is, it’s like someone reached into your body and touched an internal organ that was REALLY not supposed to be touched. Your entire body will be screaming at you to get up and run and I had issues trying to stay still. The last few seconds were the most painful part, I still to this day swear to god that I actually felt the IUD arms expand and scrape against the side of my uterus and then hit the top, I screamed bloody murder, lost my vision could only see flashing colors.. I almost ripped the table I was laying on apart..and then he pulled out the inserter and the pain was over. Like I was surprised how fast the pain just stopped it went from 100 to 0. And then I just cried for 2 days and I didn’t know why, my doctor told me that crying was a trauma response and yeah.. that was definitely traumatic.

I didn’t have cramps, I didn’t bleed. (Aside from the cut bleeding after I went pee a few mins later)

The only thing I felt was about a few days later my uterus started kicking it around, pretty much deciding if it was going to get along with it and that was pretty painful and weird feeling but I’d rate that pan a 3 on the 1-10 pain scale but that stopped soon enough.

I couldn’t have sex or bathe in a bath for 2 weeks to let my cervix heal. They were really close to putting stitches in my cervix but chose not to. It healed up fine. And I haven’t had any issues, it doesn’t give me any side effects at all even though it’s the hormonal IUD. It just majorly sucked to have it inserted.

I still think about this sometimes and even though a lot of people have no issue getting it inserted, I think there should be better pain management options because that was fucking terrible.